Pale things

When he walked in the evening he was often overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness, of not being known by anyone. He thought of himself as a little boy standing before an ocean wave, and being enveloped, all alone, covered completely by the water, bathed in the sound, alone, forever. And so when he took these walks at night he took them as a puppy or a very friendly dog would, in search of someone to unburden his soul to, if soul’s existed, or whether they were just constructions of the mind. He deemed the answer unimportant, because he felt that he had something that needed to be shared.

It was commonplace, he knew, to live in the depths of a city and feel completely anonymous. The street was lined by empty cars and old blue gum trees that had been planted some forty years before. 

He had had a dream for what seemed like weeks. It took place out west somewhere, near or in a desert. The sun was always low on the horizon and alternatively bright red or black depending on the day. In the dream he was sitting around a campfire at either breakfast or late at night, drinking a cup of coffee from a silver mug, and sitting around in a circle with a group of men who were vague replicas of old friends and family. Not one of them was particularly distinct. If it was the morning dream an eagle or a falcon flew overhead, creating a dark silhouette against the red of the sky, and he tended to look up at it in the dream without attaching any symbolism, just admiring the majesty of flight. 

The men in the circle were all wearing blankets of the sort that you purchased in road side stands in the southwest, grey mostly, with designs in red beads of old Indian rituals or buffalos shaped like smoke running nowhere. Most of the men had hats and a few of them were chewing bits of tobacco and spitting it into their cups. The fire was mostly embers, and, either way, day or night, the wind was chilled.

They were always waiting in these dreams, not talking, just creating a rhythm of spits into tin cans or small glottal stops brought on by coffee. In the distance, with only a dark silhouette appearing first coming up over a rise, backlit by the sun, as if her were riding it, was the shape of a man. Nobody said anything when the shape appeared thought there was a general shifting of bodies and of blankets, so that all of them were eventually watching the approach of the silhouette. This then is what they had gathered for. It was the man for whom they’d been waiting. His horse, pale white, approached at a slow walk, heaving this way and that like a drunken sailor.